


Collect Your Scars (and wear 'em well)

by Abbie



Series: Leave Out All the Rest [5]
Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Amnesia, Gen, Scars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-30
Updated: 2014-06-30
Packaged: 2018-02-06 19:53:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1870299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Abbie/pseuds/Abbie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Oliver doesn't recognize his own body.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Collect Your Scars (and wear 'em well)

Oliver stood naked in front of the floor-length bathroom mirror.

Steam fogged the edges of the glass and water droplets rolled down his heated skin, over muscular ridges and plains—over blasted old burns, thin, raised white lines, puckered dips from old holes—and Oliver’s eyes followed.

Of everything, his own naked body was the most surreal thing of waking up in a world over seven years fast forwarded.

Fingertips—rougher, more callused—landed on his collarbone and slowly tripped downward (a bitter, wry huff puffed on his lips; so apparently it took him until nearly age 30, but he’d finally grown some chest hair, thin and light as it was.)

He was damaged goods.

The thought slammed him like a brick between the eyes, and pricked them wet, and Oliver barked a hard laugh. Ollie Queen had _always_ been damaged goods.

Now it was written on his skin, in unfamiliar ink and old wounds with untold stories, mapped across his torso, his hips, his arms and legs.

Even his face. His nose looked like it’d been broken at some point when the expensive family doctors weren’t there to set it neatly. Little pale lines etched on his jaw, his cheekbones—one so slight it was almost invisible under his bottom lip. Another curved into his eyebrow. Others ticked along his hairline like a tally.

He wanted to know what they counted.

There was _nothing_ that wasn’t disconcerting about waking up without years of memory. Not the way the world had gone on without him, through presidential elections and Top 40 countdowns and wars and box office hits. Not the way none of the relationships he’d known had been unchanged, his people aged and altered and _looking at him differently_.

And he didn’t know why.

He didn’t know what was different. He could mark his broader shoulders and shorter hair, he could see the lines on his mother’s face—could find the gangly, adoring 12 year old in his gorgeous, wry and wary _20_ year old sister—could pick out the new faces that were claimed to matter to him now.

But he didn’t know a single goddamn story.

And every time he asked a question or stumbled onto some obvious new standard of his life, or was told a story, there were only _more_ questions, more unknown.

Even worse, he found he couldn’t trust the tales that he was told to be true. Not from his mother, who looked at him with guarded, watchful eyes when she thought he wouldn’t notice, not his sister, who held herself like at any moment he might explode like a bomb, or turn inside out into someone unrecognizable to her _again_.

Not Tommy, his best friend, his brother in every way that counted, who’d fucked his ex-girlfriend and visited his grave and apparently ran his nightclub, and watched him like sometimes he wasn’t sure who he was talking to.

Not his father, dead, apparently buried at sea.

Not John Diggle, who everyone insisted was a friend, not just a bodyguard, who looked at him like he _expected more_ from Oliver in ways that Oliver had never been known to be capable of giving.

And sure as hell not Felicity Smoak, the most incongruous piece in this new life, who couldn’t seem to decide if she wanted to keep her place in it or give it up in heartbreak and disgust. Who felt familiar, when nothing about her made any sense in the life of Ollie Queen.

He didn’t know who any of them were anymore.

And worse, in this foreign flesh, scarred and weathered and harboring mysterious aches and inexplicable strength and reflexes, even his _body_ was keeping secrets from him.

It felt like the ultimate betrayal, and stirred a slow-bubbling rise of fury and resentment in Oliver’s gut. His fingertips traced a star inked into his chest, ticked down a vertical line of Chinese characters, and his nostrils flared, the jaw that was squarer than before clenching as he ground his teeth.

Oliver looked up from his skin to meet his own eyes, storm-blue chips of stone, in the mirror, and lashed out on impulse, a short, vicious cry bursting on his lips as his fist slammed into the glass.

It shattered in a web around the impact, and Oliver pulled his bloodied knuckles away, no more satisfied.

Seven years gone, five of them on a goddamn _deserted island_ where he’d apparently gotten a gym membership in hell. Two of them home to new tragedies and new friendships—and apparently a metric fuckton of secrets.

Secrets no one in his life trusted him enough to share with him.

 _Fine_.

They didn’t want to trust Ollie Queen, useless college dropout, degenerate bad boyfriend, and wild partying billionaire.

He wasn’t about to trust the man he wasn’t anymore, or anyone who looked at him and expected to see him standing in Ollie’s shoes.

He’d wait and see who broke first.

If the map of scars on his skin was any guide, it would take a hell of a lot more than he’d ever thought to break him.

**Author's Note:**

> Bet you thought you'd seen the last of me! In this particular world, anyways. NOPE. MORE AMNESIA!OLLIE TO COME.


End file.
